Digitization and innovation. How a world leader in manufacturing optimized production by mapping business processes with Cardanit

When you operate in a challenging sector like manufacturing you need to focus on innovation to stay ahead of your competitors. To use the right technologies that help you become competitive, you need to get your processes right, meaning you have to analyze the existing ones to improve them. Once you’ve done that, implementing them is key to overcoming the challenges in an evolving market.

Here’s why Inox Tech, a producer of pipes for the Oil and Gas industry, reviewed their procedures to enable a new step in their Digital Transformation: improving their business processes means becoming even more competitive in a challenging industry like the manufacturing one.

The ContextBusiness processes for high standard in production

Inox Tech is a manufacturer of large outside diameter welded pipes in the global Oil & Gas market, with the ability to manufacture a high-quality product, accomplishing all their clients’ requirements. Willingness to face new challenges, flexibility, customized solutions, skills, responsibility and experience are all strong values within Inox Tech.

To make sure their digital transformation would take place keeping the same high standards in production, Inox Tech appointed Quin as a consultancy to lead them in an ambitious digitization and innovation project. The goal of the project is to enhance their core processes, improve their performance and production to strengthen their delivery times and customer service. Cristiano Ponton from Quin still follows them in their innovation journey focusing on reviewing their procedures.

The ChallengeMapping each stage in the manufacturing process

Inox Tech's main need was to describe accurately each stage of the manufacturing process. Knowing each stage in detail is crucial to spot inefficiencies, cut costs, comply with the current legislation and minimize operational and quality risks. This can be done by optimizing the existing workflows and by expediting the implementation of technical and technological innovations; especially in the Oil & Gas industry, where safety and quality are managed by higher standards. On top of that, an accurate manufacturing process mapping helps manage effectively the production in a constantly changing environment when it comes to supply and demand of raw materials.

The project ran with Quin kickstarted from these very considerations and objectives by assessing and analyzing the as-is model and by setting the innovation roadmap. From a software perspective, Inox Tech implemented a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) connected both with an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and with some machine automation. This enables gathering timely and accurate data from the machine and the plants, allowing a wider and complete vision of the whole workload organization and of the factory itself.

The SolutionImplementing manufacturing process mapping with BPMN to visualize complexity

It was clear that the usage of a standard like Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN) would have helped Inox Tech mapping those processes they wanted to analyze.

Thanks to our long-term partnership, Quin chose Cardanit as a BPMN modeler. Cardanit allows drawing as-is processes in a simple and intuitive way. Furthermore, it helps clearly visualize the complexity and segmentation of the activities according to the different order management software currently used by Inox Tech.

Before Cardanit, the manufacturing process mapping exercise at Inox Tech was unstructured and limited to few areas. Because it’s based on the BPMN standard and it’s very easy to use, process mapping has become a constant procedure within Inox Tech.

The fact that Cardanit is based on the cloud enabled Inox Tech and Cristiano to share their projects in real time and see the changes happening while working on it.

The BenefitsImproving efficiency with the help of Cardanit

The project, which is still in progress, already brought some relevant results for Inox Tech: process mapping gave a bigger control and awareness of manufacturing flows and allowed the identification of processes shared between different departments. The analysis work ran by Cristiano and Quin with the support of the Inox Tech staff helped define the to-be model and identify the solutions and the tools more suitable to optimize existing processes and improve the manufacturing efficiency.

At the same time, Quin is going to develop further the cooperation with Inox Tech. This will involve more integration between the sales and the production departments by:

• starting different activities that are going to help improve Supply Chain management
• exploiting all the potential development coming from data analysis tools.

Looking at the future, Inox Tech definitely wants to keep using and refine all the technical processes implemented so far with the help of Cardanit. This means not only an improvement in Inox Tech’s manufacturing efficiency, but also all types of cooperation within the manufacturing industry aimed at continuous innovation and sustainable operations.

You can find the Italian version of this success story on Quin's website.

Further reading

Use case: Why BPM modeling can help streamline processes in the IT sector

Blog post: Modeling manufacturing processes with BPMN and DMN standards

Inox Tech

Inox Tech is the leading manufacturer of large outside diameter welded pipes in the global Oil & Gas market and has been in this business since 1989. Its focus is on LNG’s, refineries and subsea applications. Inox Tech manufactures large outside pipes from plates, with a total capacity of approx 30.000 tons per year. With a high-qualified staff, Inox Tech can provide accurate project management to customers, from the very first steps to the delivery of their pipes.

Quin

Quin is a strategic and executive consulting firm providing IT solutions in Operations & Supply Chain Management and Business Performance Management. Since 2011, Quin has been guiding companies, SMEs, and large organizations toward digital and sustainable transformation through an end-to-end approach that integrates management, IT, and leadership expertise, synergistically involving organization, people, processes, and tools.